Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I support the amendment and give notice of something that is already happening in this area, organised by Community Service Volunteers in Sunderland. This is a proposal called the VYOI—the Virtual Young Offenders Institute—which has been funded by the Treasury to the tune of £3 million for three years; this is the third year. It entails young offenders whose criminality is not deemed so great being given the opportunity of living with and being intensively fostered by a foster parent appointed by Community Service Volunteers. The offenders are given employment and education and they are helped into accommodation when their period is over. Of course, if they fail in any way to come up to the terms of the scheme, they are sent back to custody. The interesting thing about this experiment was that it took an enormously long time for Community Service Volunteers, having got funding from the Treasury, and supported in its appeal for it by the then chief executive of NOMS, to persuade the Probation Service and others to release these young offenders into intensive fostering, because they claimed that the offenders were their responsibility. What is happening now is that the work is in progress, overseen by the regional offender manager in the north-east, and an evaluation of this project, funded by the Helen Hamlyn Trust, is being carried out by Newcastle University. Here I declare an interest, because I am an adviser to the Helen Hamlyn Trust and suggested that it should fund this evaluation. It would be worth the Minister monitoring this, because it is something practical that has potential and there are evaluated results that can be taken into account.